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Microsoft Corp admitted its largest acquisition in the Internet sector was effectively worthless and wiped out any profit for the last quarter, as it announced a $6.2 billion charge to write down the value of an online advertising agency it bought five years ago. The announcement came as a surprise, but did not shock investors, who had largely forgotten Microsoft's purchase of aQuantive in 2007, which was initially expected to boost Microsoft's online advertising revenue and rival Google Inc's purchase of DoubleClick.

Yelp is feeding its online reviews of restaurants and other local merchants to Microsoft's Bing search engine in a move to compete against Zagat ratings on Google.

Last Thursday, Microsoft announced several new features to the upcoming IE10, which will launch as part of Windows 8. One of these features, which turns on “Do Not Track” by default, has caused quite a stir over the weekend as new outlets and bloggers have discussed the potential benefits and ramifications of this feature.

Faltering Internet icon AOL was able to squeeze out more than $1 billion from Microsoft for a trove of some 800 patents in an auction, the latest sign of just how valuable such portfolios can be for the world's biggest technology companies.

In 2010, Google gave its search engine a jolt, moving the web’s de facto gateway onto a new software platform dubbed “Caffeine.” Designed by Google itself, Caffeine was a way for the company to more rapidly add new links to its massive index of websites, including news stories and blog posts and chatter from web forums. According to the company, it provided “50 percent fresher” search results than its previous indexing system, which was based on a seminal Google creation called MapReduce.

Discovery comes just days after Web giant was found to be sidestepping the user privacy preferences in Apple's Safari. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Security.

A month ago, Google's three-year effort to push its Web browser, Chrome, took a major step when analysts said it had passed Mozilla's Firefox to become the second-most popular tool of its kind on the Internet. Today, that climb continues and has some tech observers wondering whether Chrome could do the unthinkable and topple perennial leader Internet Explorer from atop the browser rankings.

Competition's all relative. Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL all compete for ad dollars, but they all agree that marketers ought to put their budgets into premium content, not search or social.

Welp, it's official. Microsoft and Skype are one. Well, Skype isn't alone in this world any longer, anyway. While this deal was announced months back, there has been plenty of work in the time being to ensure all the legalities were ironed out. Now, Microsoft has closed its acquisition of Skype, locking in an $8.5 billion payment that was...

The European Commission approved Friday the proposed $8.5 billion acquisition of the Internet phone and video communication provider Skype by Microsoft Corp., saying the deal would not significantly impede competition in Europe. The approval appears to be the final step in the technology company’s effort to acquire Skype. The European Commission is the EU’s executive branch.